It really is astonishing to see how the left in this country is working itself into a frenzy of race, sex, and gender hatred. It is moving out of the academic fringes and well into the mainstream. Take a look at what the (Latino) schools chancellor Richard Carranza in New York City ordered the administrators and principals in the massive urban school system to undergo. The New York Post reports:

City Department of Education brass are targeting a “white-supremacy culture” among school administrators — by disparaging ideas like “individualism,” “objectivity” and “worship of the written word,” The Post has learned.

A presentation slide obtained by The Post offers a bullet-point description of the systemic, supposedly pro-white favoritism that Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza claims must be eradicated from the DOE, and provides just one insight into his anti-bias training efforts.

The list — derived from “Dismantling Racism: A Workbook for Social Change Groups” by Kenneth Jones and Tema Okun — names more than a dozen hallmarks of “white-supremacy culture” that school administrators are expected to steer clear of.

Here’s a graphic the Post created, taken from the training. If it’s too small for you to read here, click on this link, and you’ll see a bigger version:

I hope you will read it, in detail. The basic argument is that the fundamental qualities of professionalism, achievement, logic, clear thinking, and literacy are manifestations of white supremacy. The unavoidable corollary is that mediocrity is racially authentic. The NYC schools system adopted the toxic Acting White philosophy as a guide for its administrators. Andrew Sullivan writes:

I’m often told that the social-justice left’s assault on individuality, meritocracy, and achievement is a figment of my imagination, or only true in isolated pockets of super-woke academia. But here is one of the largest school systems in the country imposing this ideology on its most important employees, mandating lessons in “whiteness,” allegedly firing women solely because they are white, and indoctrinating an entire generation into associating the virtues of objective truth, academic excellence, and reason with the worst kind of bigotry. If you want to know why liberal democracy is in peril in America, mandatory indoctrination in critical race and gender theory is a factor not to be underrated.

Take a look at this fantastic passage from the Post story. It’s George Orwell by way of Bonfire Of The Vanities:

“It requires discomfort,” said Matt Gonzales, who serves as an outside adviser on the DOE’s school diversity task force and is a director of New York Appleseed, an advocacy group for school integration.

“Having to talk about someone’s own whiteness is a requirement for them to become liberated.”

Several recent attendees of the DOE’s overarching implicit-bias training sessions — mandatory for all, including teachers — have bristled at the program’s emphasis on the inherent insidiousness of “white” culture.

White employees who object when accused of harboring deep-seated bias are branded “fragile” and “defensive,” one insider who received the training has said.

But [Schools Chancellor Richard] Carranza said on Monday that such skeptics often don’t realize their own biases until they are forced to confront them and that they are likely the ones who need the training the most.

“It’s good work. It’s hard work,” Carranza said. “And I would hope that anybody that feels that somehow that process is not beneficial to them, I would very respectfully say they are the ones that need to reflect even harder upon what they believe.”

Got that? Resistance to the claim that you are guilty is evidence of your guilt. The book I’m writing about resisting the new soft totalitarianism has a lot to do with this kind of thing. I remind you that this is not something from the fringes of the far left, but was the diversity training course for administrators in the world’s largest public school system (serving 1.1 million kids).

I have said in this space for years that the illiberal left — and this demonizing of straight white men is totally illiberal — is calling forth demons with this kind of talk. What do they honestly expect straight white males — and the women who are married to them, and who have them as sons — to do? Roll over with their bellies up and whimper for mercy, like a liberal Protestant pastor, or an English department associate professor? Every time the left engages in rhetoric like this, or worse, institutes programs (like the NYC schools training) to institutionalize anti-white, anti-male, anti-heterosexual bigotry, they give implicit permission for straights, for whites, and for men to act on their own prejudices against minorities. And they incentivize straight white males (and, um, allies) to vote for anti-left politicians, if only as a matter of self-protection.

As you’ve probably noticed, bashing straight white men, especially of the conservative kind, is very fashionable these days.

You seemingly can’t escape it — you switch on cable TV, or “The View”, read The Washington Post or The New York Times, and see liberal pundits verbally attack white men for this or that.

It’s become often enough that it is seemingly now normal to just casually attack a broad group of the country’s citizens.

And sometimes race is inserted gratuitously even when it isn’t an issue, like during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings: the Republican senators on the Judiciary Committee were attacked as old white men.

Besides, there is the strangeness in the spectacle of certain white people calling out certain other white people on their whiteness.

What gives? What is happening is that everyone’s id is now not just out in the open, it has gone berserk.

Yes. When I was in Australia last week, I saw a common theme on the left, denouncing Alabama’s strict anti-abortion law, was that it was passed by “straight white men.” As if that were enough to discredit it. As if it had not been signed by a female governor. None of these facts matter. It is enough among many on the mainstream left simply to associate an idea with straight white men to discredit it. More Prabhu:

Whenever I hear someone on TV bash white men, my overriding feeling is “Excuse me, but I really don’t want to be a party to this.”

I am a brown, female immigrant and I can assure these leaders and pundits that there’s no anger coursing through my veins at white people or men as a group.

One can have historical and contemporary awareness of inequities and injustices, without having hateful feelings toward the ordinary white citizens around us.

Today’s Democratic Party is predicated on having and expressing open hostility toward white citizens. They are making the dangerous bet that most minorities and immigrants will jump on the white-male-bashing bandwagon.

But it could backfire and turn off many voters. If you ask most minorities and immigrants, they’ll probably tell you they just want a fair, equal shot at the American Dream, and that they’re not angling for racial payback or Civil War Take 2.

Call me crazy, but I think you’d have to be out of your mind as a person who is straight, white, male, or some combination of the three, to vote these identity-politics Bolsheviks into office. They actually want people at each other’s throats over race, sex, and gender. They actually want to turn America into Yugoslavia. What other explanation could there be? They’re going to find out that the United States is not the faculty Senate.

about the author

Rod Dreher is a senior editor at The American Conservative. He has written and edited for the New York Post, The Dallas Morning News, National Review, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, the Washington Times, and the Baton Rouge Advocate. Rod’s commentary has been published in The Wall Street Journal, Commentary, the Weekly Standard, Beliefnet, and Real Simple, among other publications, and he has appeared on NPR, ABC News, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and the BBC. He lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, with his wife Julie and their three children. He has also written four books, The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, Crunchy Cons, How Dante Can Save Your Life, and The Benedict Option.

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